THE FIGHTER

In May of 1945, Moshe Wisniak is traveling to Paris by train, exactly 16 years after he first moved there from Poland. Now he’s a survivor of Auschwitz, and when he finds his family, his son is afraid of him. He looks like a vampire: gray skin, eyes popping out of his skull, shaved head. But he’s a fighter. Greif based the novel on the experiences of his father’s friend—not just a witness, but a Jewish hero. Moshe learned to box in Paris, and a central scene of the story is his moral dilemma when commanded to fight a dying prisoner: He must kill the opponent or be killed by the SS if he refuses. But he knows he doesn’t want to return home and have his son know his father is a murderer. It’s a spirit that will resonate with readers, though the final lines of the afterword are important: “To survive in Auschwitz, being strong and knowing how to fight did not suffice. You needed lots of luck.” (Fiction. 12+)